More Justice Department Cases Over Financial Crisis May Be On The Way

It appears that in the coming months U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder will be filing more cases related to the economic meltdown. The Justice Department is near to reaching decisions on a number of probes involving large financial firms. The Wall Street Journal reported last month on the prospects of this new wave of litigation. “Anybody who’s inflicted damage on our financial markets should not be of the belief that they are out of the woods because of the passage of time,” the Attorney General told the Journal in an interview. But he declined to discuss specific cases or say when the cases would be announced, the Journal’s report said. It has been reported that Attorney General Holder may be leaving office before the end of his term. But he told the Journal that he wouldn’t leave the job before making major charging decisions on cases stemming from the 2008 financial collapse.

Attorney General Holder’s comments came as the U.S. government was taking steps to hold companies responsible for breaking the law in financing the housing bubble that led to the financial crisis. He had said last month that the Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force he set up would continue to take an aggressive approach to combating financial fraud and uncovering abuses in the residential mortgage-backed securities market.

Recent disclosures from some of Wall Street’s biggest financial firms, including JPMorgan Chase & Co and Bank of America Corp, have shown that the federal government is pursuing new prosecutions of possible abuses in the mortgage-backed securities industry. Attorney General Holder said in the Journal interview:

These are complex cases that require enormous amounts of effort to put together, but we are at a point – as you’ve seen, I think, recently – where the results of that difficult work is starting to bear fruit. No individual, no company is above the law. We don’t investigate companies based on who a CEO is, but we don’t avoid investigating companies based on who the CEO is, either.

It will be interesting to see what ultimately comes out of the Department of Justice and whether more suits will be filed. It’s quite obvious that there have been a number of companies that played fast and loose with the law. Those companies that broke the law should be held accountable.